COURSE of the MONTH

Vista Boot Drive Letter is Incorrect

Have a Gateway LX5810 running Vista Home Pro.

Every time I boot the PC the boot drive is the E drive and the recovery partition is the C drive. Windows won't run any of the programs. All I really want to do is get the partitions straight so I can do a system restore, but the recovery partition won't boot now. It's a real mess. When I try MSCONFIG it says it can't find it on the E drive. Even when I find it and try to open it (or anything else) it says not on the edrive.

I messed with the BCD records and tried to delete and rebuild with no luck.

Who is Participating?

1) Delete the BCD files on all partitions. I also deleted the BCD logs.
2) Boot from a Windows 7 or Vista CD.
3) Get to a command prompt
4) bootrec.exe /rebuildos

Also, the bcd files are hidden so you need to attrib -s -h -r these files.

After I did this it said it found 2 partitions and made the PE partition E: and the boot partition C:. I read that when Gateway boots into the PE partition it automatically changes the letters of the drives around. I must have screwed the BCD'c up sooo bad that they got switched.

I'm a bit confused but let me see - Are you booting into the command prompt? Do you have a Windows Vista Boot CD/DVD? You'll probably need to repair it from there.

Do you recall what has been done prior to this error? It could be a corrupt drive - can you scan with chkdsk /f

do you have onboard diagnostics to help scan for hardware problems?

You may need to run fixmbr and fixboot drive letter from the console.

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ss6766Author Commented: 2012-03-22

Have run all the scans and the FIX MBR and BOOT. No. I am booting into Windows. I just opened a cmd prompt when nothing else worked. I believe the problem lies in the bootmgr settings, but that's just a guess. I even went as far as deleting the recover partition so there is only 1 drive/partition and it still assigns the disk to E not C.

1. Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
2. Find the drive letter you want to change to (new). Look for "\DosDevices\C:".
3. Rename it to an unused drive letter "\DosDevices\Z:".
This frees up drive letter C.
4. Find the drive letter you want changed. Look for "\DosDevices\D:".
5. Rename it to the appropriate (new) drive letter "\DosDevices\C:".
6. Click the value for \DosDevices\Z:, click Rename, and then name it back to "\DosDevices\D:".